Britishness seen from abroad:

Beppe Severgnini, The Economist, 8 January 1994

Virtues unrewarded

The British are good at living next to each other, and at pulling together when need be. Government in Britain is better than almost anywhere elsethe machinery of the British government is still reasonably efficient and clean. []

Political scandals in Britain are also few and far between. Most of the time they involve a young woman (some of the time a young man) and are almost touching in their display of forgiveable human fallibility. Italian scandals are nastier, more sordid and definitely more boring. They always revolve around the same commodity: money

The nations foundations, in other words, are sound. Never mind the weak state of the monarchy or the Church of England (Britain would do better without either a monarchy or a state religion). British nationalismwhen it is sober and is not paraded around football groundsis healthy, an expression of Britons genuine affection for their country rather than an ugly or aggressive expression of contempt towards others.

The British do not seem to have any inhibitions about being British: the countrys geography, undoubtedly, helps. So does history. Britain has no big chunk of its past it needs to forgetunlike Japan, Germany or Italy. As there is no British Vichy [collaborationist French government, 1940-44] and no British Vietnam, Britain has also fewer hang-ups [emotional difficulty, inhibition] than either France or the United States. In 20th-century Britain there has been no scuttling around censoring monuments and covering memorials. The bits of history the British want to remove (from the bombing of Dresden [Febr. 1954], to some colonial heavy-handedness, to their treatment of the Irish), they do so painlessly, in a careless sort of way.

The British still display two other characteristics I noticed on my first visit in the 1970s: stoicism and thrift. They still put up with anything: rain, queues and bombs in London, and they do not need much, judging by the same plain decors of most British homes []. Walter Bagehot [British writer, 1826-1877] wrote that the British have a redeeming feature: they are dull. It is an interesting observation. Just look what sort of state we Italians, who think we are clever, have produced.

And yet the British themselves seem unable to appreciate any of the achievements of modern Britain, and prefer to dwell on the embarrassments, mistakes and cock-ups [a state or instance of confusion; mix-up] (of which, to be fair, there is no shortage). It is a form of masochism which brings people to enjoy sporting defeats more than victories Not once was I told how good British theatre or the BBC World Service still are, or how impressive Marks and Spencer [chain of quality stores] and British Airways have become.

There are many more examples of the British failing to appreciate what they do well and concentrating instead on what they do badly. The nation whose supremacy in the 19th century spanned so many fieldswith the notable exceptions of abstract philosophy, music, cuisine and lovemaking, as Luigi Barzini, my countryman, once notedhas managed to excel again. This time, though, its triumph is a sour one. The British have managed to turn grumbling into an art form, and are kilometres ahead of anyone else at it.

John Lloyd, The New Statesman, 26 June 1998

The making of cruel BritanniaWe think we are civilized, warm-hearted people, but abroad, they think Britons of all classes are just naturally violent.

Britannia is perceived to be cruel abroad; a blow to a self-image based on a vision of warm hearts bobbing about benignly on a moderate intake of warm beer. As some foreigners see it, the country wallows in a left-over, upper-class imperial pride; others see it as a leading exporter of yobs [persons given to violence, drunkenness and bad behaviour].

For Britannia, at least now, read England. England, cut out from the rest of Britain by the unique British habit of separating itself into its component nations/regions in order to fail more often to win the World Cup, is seen to have the yobbiest culture in Europe. []

It is the English whose upper classes provide the accent of evil in Hollywood movies and Disney cartoons. It is the English whom Paul Keating, the acerbic former premier of Australia, characterized in an interview this year as a mix of arrogance and comic blimpishness [characteristic of a pompous and reactionary person]. It was England which, in the words of one of its yobs arrested two weeks ago in Marseilles, used to own three-quarters of the fing world and now must pay a long, slow fine for the privilege.

[]

But the most potent image presently is that of the yob. That football hooliganism is intrinsically linked to nation and to the aggressive projection of nation was shown, even more clearly than now, in February 1995. That was when a group of young men, some of whom were members of the neo-Nazi Combat 18, incited a riot at Dublins Lansdowne Road stadium during a game against England and hurled abuse, bottles and bricks at Irish fans. They were there in defence of Britain in general and Ulster in particular. Identifying the Irish nation with the IRA, they screamed their hatred of the Irish from the terraces.

[]

The image of English nastiness may be an irritant to foreigners, but, in fairness, it should be acknowledged that it also serves a useful purpose. The historic anti-English grudge comes often from nations such as Australia and the US, both used as gulags to which Britain exported its criminals. This has helped to inscribe in those societies a demotic, anti-posh culture that loves to preserve snob-England in the aspic of their own self-image, presenting themselves as plain men and women, the plainer and more honest in contrast to Englands sinuous litism.

[] cruel cannot be easily banished by cool. The world needs the arrogant Englishman, the cruel despoiler of other cultures []. It is part of the global collective treasure trove of stereotypes, and will not be given up. Cool does not play as well as cruel; it is our late millennial version of the white mans burden [reference to Rudyard Kiplings poem (1899), in which he urged the Americans to undertake the task of civilizing the people in the Philippines, recently conquered in the Spanish-American war].